Integration Interrupted

Tracking, Black Students, and Acting White after Brown

Karolyn Tyson

Provides a new perspective on how and why black students equate school success with whiteness by arguing that the schools convey this message not other black students

Integration Interrupted

Tracking, Black Students, and Acting White after Brown

Karolyn Tyson

Description

An all-too-popular explanation for why black students aren't doing better in school is their own use of the "acting white" slur to ridicule fellow blacks for taking advanced classes, doing schoolwork, and striving to earn high grades. Carefully reconsidering how and why black students have come to equate school success with whiteness, Integration Interrupted argues that when students understand race to be connected with achievement, it is a powerful lesson conveyed by schools, not their peers. Drawing on over ten years of ethnographic research, Karolyn Tyson shows how equating school success with "acting white" arose in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education through the practice of curriculum tracking, which separates students for instruction, ostensibly by
ability and prior achievement. Only in very specific circumstances, when black students are drastically underrepresented in advanced and gifted classes, do anxieties about "the burden of acting white" emerge. Racialized tracking continues to define the typical American secondary school, but it goes unremarked, except by the young people who experience its costs and consequences daily. The rich narratives in Integration Interrupted throw light on the complex relationships underlying school behaviors and convincingly demonstrate that the problem lies not with students, but instead with how we organize our schools.

Integration Interrupted

Tracking, Black Students, and Acting White after Brown

Karolyn Tyson

Author Information

Karolyn Tyson is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Integration Interrupted

Tracking, Black Students, and Acting White after Brown

Karolyn Tyson

Reviews and Awards

Winner of the 2012 Pierre Bourdieu Prize from the Sociology of Education section of the American Sociological Association

Awarded a 2012 Critics Choice Book Award from the American Educational Studies Association

"Integration Interrupted is a masterpiece. In this beautifully written and meticulously researched book, Karolyn Tyson's close examination of how our schools are implicated in the creation of oppositional culture among all students, white as well as black, should occasion a major rethinking among scholars and policymakers about the mechanisms and processes that produce racial inequality in American education." --Pamela Barnhouse Walters, James H. Rudy Professor of Sociology, Indiana University

"Using the voices of students from kindergarten to senior year, Tyson historicizes the 'acting white' epithet. Noting that rarely does educational success form the content of 'acting white,' Tyson traces this term to the structure of desegregated schools, notably the racialization of achievement through visible school policies. By excavating the contextual factors involved, Integration Interrupted makes an important contribution, one that offers no comfort to those quick to blame black students for their disadvantages." --Samuel R. Lucas, University of California, Berkeley

Integration Interrupted is an important contribution to the literature on race and academic acheivement. Tyson effectively shifts the focus of the "acting white" debate from black students' culture to local school structures such as the demographics of the student population and the racial composition of advanced classes. The author highlights how "racialized" tracking in schools works to undermine the academic and social benefits we have come to expect from students' attendance at integrated, racially diverse schools." --Contemporary Sociology

"In Integration Interrupted, Tyson users over ten years of qualitative research with data from 250 students in over thirty elemtnary and secondary schools... Tyson shows that school context and structures tend to shape students' attitudes around achievement." --Social Forces

"Tyson's book... is insightful and well written." --American Journal of Sociology